Oprah and the Dregs

Last week, after years on the sidelines, I finally joined Oprah's book club.

Up until then, I had been content to watch Oprah from afar. I had never seen more than a few moments of any book club episode -- or any other episode of her show, for that matter (excluding, of course, YouTube clips of Tom Cruise's career running off the tracks).

Don't misunderstand: I am constitutionally unable to feel anything but admiration for a woman who uses her celebrity to put Tolstoy on the bestseller list. Besides which, I have known enough highly intelligent and intellectually engaged stay-at-home moms to reject the dismissive response of some critics towards the average Oprah viewer. At the same time, the club-based approach to fiction -- reading as social activity -- remains alien to me. The few times I have tried it, the most satisfying part was the drinks, and Oprah's show comes on before drinking time. And so for some years I have been content to read news of Oprah's picks in the paper and discuss their merits with friends. But last month word came that Cormac McCarthy's The Road had been picked, and that McCarthy would be submitting to an interview.

Prior to this, McCarthy's last major press appearance had been fifteen years ago in the New York Times. His two most recent novels, Blood Meridian and Suttree, had sold less than 10,000 copies each. But his agent and his publishers had reason to believe that his latest, All the Pretty Horses, would finally break him out. In their effort to assure as much, they convinced McCarthy to sit for an interview -- a form he seems to find not merely trifling but pernicious -- by assuring him that they wouldn't ask again for a very long time. The resulting article noted that, "McCarthy would rather talk about rattlesnakes, molecular computers, country music, Wittgenstein -- anything -- than himself or his books." On the subject of literary interviews, McCarthy seems to agree with William Gaddis, who once asked, "What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?"

In the decade and half since then, McCarthy's early obscurity has become just another part of his legend -- much as it did for his hero, Faulkner. He is now routinely placed alongside Roth and Pynchon among the finest living American novelists, and his work has sold extremely well, even before Oprah's imprimatur. But it needs also to be said that he has produced nothing in these years up to the standard of Blood Meridian and Suttree, and that he has written one cringer, No Country For Old Men. He was awarded the Pulitzer for his latest effort, The Road, which many have called his masterpiece. This seems to me the kind of wishful thinking that twice led the same Pulitzer committee to reward Faulkner's comparatively weak later novels. No one wants to admit that the best work was done before we got there, but in both cases this seems to be so.

Through all the commercial ups and artistic downs, McCarthy has continued to avoid the spotlight, even as it has become more and more accessible to him. But in the end, Oprah is Oprah.

And so it was that I joined her Book Club, to watch Oprah Winfrey sit down for a chat with the dregs of Cormac McCarthy's work.

I've watched the talk online several times since then (membership has its privileges), and it only gets more difficult to get through. To be clear, this isn't Oprah's fault. She asks the questions that every academic McCarthy specialist would want her to put at the top of her list -- about his work's idiosyncratic punctuation, about its relationship to women, to violence, to God. Of course, she also asks a few banal questions, but even these are banal in open-ended ways that could easily allow for significant answers.

Nor is it really McCarthy's fault, as he seems to be making a good faith effort here. But it's obvious that he isn't just posturing when he says he has nothing to add to the work. What's on the page is on the page. It's telling that his most interesting remarks are not about his thematic concerns or his life story, but about the role of the unconscious. He appears to be a deeply intuitive writer and not much interested in considering his own work analytically. I couldn't help thinking that he should have been true to this urge, and that all of us -- Oprah, too -- should have let him. This is not a matter of "selling out": I'd love to see McCarthy appear alongside Pynchon on the Simpsons, or even watch him on Oprah, discussing rattlesnakes and molecular computers. But there's no need to drag the man on television to discuss a subject -- his own sometimes wonderful novels -- about which he has no urge to speak and nothing much to say. If it were up to me, I'd like to think of McCarthy sitting somewhere unwatched and alone, working on a book that will be every bit as good as those books he wrote 25 years ago, when none of us had any idea who he was.